The launch of the collections.ed.ac.uk public interface in May was a big success story in itself, but a bullet point below this was that it featured the first ever web delivered front-end for the University’s rich and diverse Art Collections. We’ve since gone one better; using the LUNA imaging platform, we can now present the best of the Art Collections in high resolution.

We’ve been able to harness photography from the Public Catalogue Foundation for both the University and the ECA, as well as a number of items from our own DIU, to surface 742 quality, zoomable images. The collection is browsable here, but importantly, the items are also linked back to their item records on collections.ed.ac.uk (simply click wherever you see “View high resolution image”- for example here). It’s important to us that the two systems complement and communicate with one another, and we have decided to use this functionality for the Calendars, and upcoming Exhibitions, collections also. I should mention, too, that we did consider the possibility of embedding the LUNA image directly into the collections.ed.ac.uk page, but after some deliberation, we decided that this solution was cleaner.

The other piece of good news about the Art Collections’ discoverability is that we have enriched the collections.ed.ac.uk set with a further 300 items, and 800 images (a lot of these are jpegs, which are generally not considered of sufficient quality for LUNA), to take us to over 3000 items and 1400 images. You can find them all at our site, and we look forward to taking advantage of further accessions and photography to make the collections ever more fascinating and inspiring online.

Thanks to the collections’ custodians (Neil Lebeter, Jill Forrest and Anna Hawkins) for all of their contributions to this piece of work.

Scott Renton, Digital Development